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Africa's ‘Last Wilderness’: Reordering Space for Political and Economic Control in Colonial Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

Roderick P. Neumann
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Abstract

Focusing on south-eastern Tanzania, this article explores the colonial state's spatial strategies for economic and political control of its citizenry and their concurrence with strategies to control and conserve nature. Analysing British colonial archival documents, it demonstrates that Africa's most famous wilderness, the Selous Game Reserve, is a product of colonisers' economic and political control schemes, not a vestigial pre-modern landscape. The analysis reveals that the control of nature was inseparable from the state's efforts to control African subjects (mostly Ngindo peasants) and ultimately to create a new kind of person: ‘civilised’, productive and surveillable. Control schemes had significant ecological consequences, specifically increasing elephant (Loxondata africana) populations and the creation of vast tracts of tsetse fly-infested bush. The result, sometimes unintended, but more often orchestrated, was the displacement of African land use and settlement and a new geography of society and nature. The article concludes that colonial efforts to reorder south-eastern Tanzania were fundamental to the process of modern nation-state building, a process that was propelled by a particular way of thinking about social order in visual terms.

Résumé

Consacré au Sud-Est de la Tanzanie, cet article examine les stratégies spatiales de l'Etat colonial en matière de maîtrise économique et politique de l'ensemble de ses citoyens et les met en parallèle avec des stratégies de maîtrise et de protection de la nature. Analysant des documents d'archives coloniales britanniques, il démontre que la région sauvage la plus célèbre d'Afrique, la réserve de gibier de Selous, est le produit de programmes de maîtrise économique et politique de colonisateurs, et non un vestige du paysage prémoderne. L'analyse révèle que la maîtrise de la nature était indissociable des efforts de l'Etat de contrôler les sujets africains (principalement des paysans Ngindo) et de créer à terme un nouveau type d'individu : « civilisé », productif et surveillable. Ces programmes de maîtrise avaient des conséquences écologiques importantes, notamment l'augmentation du nombre d'éléphants (Loxondata africana) et la création de vastes étendues d'arbustes infestés de mouches tsé-tsé. Le résultat, parfois non voulu mais très souvent orchestré, était le déplacement de l'utilisation des terres et des peuplements, et une nouvelle géographie de la société et de la nature. L'article conclut que les efforts coloniaux de réorganiser le Sud-Est de la Tanzanie étaient essentiels au processus de construction de l'Etat-nation moderne, un processus poussé par une conception particulière de l'ordre social en termes visuels.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , November 2001 , pp. 641 - 665
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2001

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